Practicing Your Presentation Delivery

You learned how to plan and structure your content in the first part of this book. Then, we discussed how to create better visuals with tools and functions available in PowerPoint or with third-party add-ins. We are now entering the delivery part.

Creating a memorable experience for your audience requires much more than planning the content and creating professional visuals. You need to practice.

Luckily, the PowerPoint development team at Microsoft has been adding tools to help presenters with their delivery in the past years. Here are the topics that will be covered in this chapter:

• Viewing and adapting Slide Show options
• Leveraging Speaker Coach to help you practice your talk
• Rehearsing timings and creating a recorded practice run
• Using the new Record feature to practice

Technical requirements

Some features discussed in the chapter require a Microsoft 365 (M365) subscription. They will be identified as such when they are explained. Be aware that since the subscription version of PowerPoint is being updated on an ongoing basis, it is possible that screenshots shown in this chapter might differ from your version of the application.

Viewing and adapting Slide Show options

Many users are not aware of all the PowerPoint options they have control over, and there are a few specific to presentation delivery. To access those options, you need to go to File | Options | Advanced (1) and scroll down to the Slide Show section (2) (Figure 11.1):

Figure 11.1 – Advanced Slide Show options in PowerPoint

• All options are turned on by default, so you might want to adapt what you want to make available according to how you plan to deliver your presentation.
• The Show menu on right mouse click option (3) can be turned off by unchecking the box if you want to avoid getting the contextual menu by clicking the right mouse button by mistake. It is not necessarily bad, but I do think using Presenter View features—the topic of the next chapter—is much better.
• The Show popup toolbar option (4) is related to the semi-transparent toolbar that can be seen in the bottom-left corner...

Leveraging Speaker Coach to help you practice your talk

The Speaker Coach feature is part of Microsoft’s cloud-enhanced features, which means you need to be connected to the internet for it to work. It was first launched in PowerPoint for the web and is now also available in the desktop version if you have an M365 license. While in the free preview stage, anyone using a Microsoft account (for example, an outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, or msn.com email) without an M365 subscription can access it in PowerPoint for the web.

Another important element, at the time this book is being written, is that Speaker Coach only understands English and is available only when your Office user interface is also in English. If you don’t know how to change the language of your user interface, have a look at the Microsoft support article in the Further reading section.

Microsoft always tests Speaker Coach enhancements in the web version first, adding them to the desktop version...

Rehearsing timings and creating a recorded practice run

If you struggle to keep on topic for some of your slides, making you run over time for most of your presentations, you should consider practicing with the Rehearse Timings feature (1) available in the Slide Show tab (2) (Figure 11.7):

Figure 11.7 – Starting and using Rehearse Timings

When you click on Rehearse Timings, it starts your presentation in Slide Show mode (2) and records how much time you spend on each slide. You will see the small Recording tool (3) in the upper-left corner of the screen. You can click through your slides with your mouse, use your keyboard, or click on the small arrow in the Recording tool (4). If you need to stop, just click the Pause button (5) in the toolbar.

The first timer (6) shows you how much time you have spent on a slide. If you need to repeat the recording, you can click on the small Repeat arrow (7). The second timer (8) shows you how long you have...

Using the new Record feature to practice

Although recording a slideshow has been available as early as Office 2013, the new Record feature introduced by Microsoft has many great tools to help you practice. Yes—its main goal is to help presenters create videos of their content for distribution, but using it to see how you look and hear how you talk is the best way to improve your delivery. You will probably hate seeing and hearing yourself the first few times—we all do!—but this type of feedback is even more realistic than just using Speaker Coach. Using both is the best practice you can have.

I will review the Record feature, but it will be shown under the angle of practicing your delivery, not producing your content to be distributed as a video file. This means not all features will be explained. If you want to follow along, make sure to open a PowerPoint file that contains notes, and have your microphone and camera ready. My example will use presentation content...

Summary

In this chapter, we have discussed how to adapt the various Slide Show options available in PowerPoint and how to leverage the Speaker Coach, Rehearse Timings, and Record features to help you rehearse your presentations and improve your delivery skills.

Of course, relying solely on technology to rehearse might not be enough depending on what is at stake. If your next presentation might win you a million-dollar project, start by allowing enough time to plan, create, and rehearse your presentation with the tools you have learned about in this chapter. Then, choose a few people you can count on to be good critics and deliver your presentation in front of them, more than once if possible. Technology can accomplish a lot, but human feedback is priceless!

In the next chapter, we will be discussing how to use Presenter View during your presentation delivery to help you increase your confidence and leverage tools to help you navigate your content even if no navigation elements...

Further reading

• Change your Office user interface language: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-language-office-uses-in-its-menus-and-proofing-tools-f5c54ff9-a6fa-4348-a43c-760e7ef148f8